68 articles
REPUBLICANS FINALLY HAVE President Clinton right where they want him. He's desperate for their support and willing to make concessions to get it. The issue is fast track, the authority Clinton needs to win ratification of new free-trade agreements without Congress amending them to death. Since most…
University of Texas law professor Lino Graglia, a distinguished scholar, caused an uproar a few weeks ago at his school. In response to efforts to recruit minorities after the Hopwood case outlawed UT Law School's affirmative action program, Graglia said that blacks and Hispanics "are not…
Stanley E. Flink
John M. Ellis
Meet the students who want to avoid the mixed-sex, free-for-all, condoms-on-demand atmosphere of college dorms.
Last winter, the New York Times Magazine pubished a study ranking the American presidents. Authored by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the study represented the latest chapter in a project started by his father, the respected Harvard historian, 50 years ago.
Vice president Gore wants you to know that the executive branch he represents is the finest, best intentioned, most effective in history. Gore is a proud man. But he is a thoughtful man, too, a teller of unpleasant truths. So he must remind us, as he did at a special "summit" meeting in Washington…
Two years ago, House Republicans sought, unsuccessfully, to place restrictions on the lobbying carried out by non-profit groups that receive federal funds. But Republicans might want to set their sights on another target: the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, which allows federal employees to work…
We note the publication of, and the ecstatic reviews for, contributing editor David Gelernter's new book Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber (Free Press). In other media developments, Jonathan Last, our research associate, is moonlighting as editor-in-chief of a new webzine called Squire: The…
It was neck and neck there for awhile. Appearing together on PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on September 12, Zbigniew Brzezinski and James Baker competed ferociously to see who could pile up the largest number of anti-Israel cliches and moral-equivalence fallacies in the briefest amount of time.…
I have become a more attentive driver than heretofore. I used to be dreamy, listening to classical music, hoping that some phrase or formulation pertinent to whatever it was I was writing at the moment would pop into my mind. Over the past decade, I have been driving BMWs, and they give a nice…
Supporters of Louisiana's new "covenant-marriage" law compare it to Ulysses' command that he be lashed to the mast of his ship to avoid being lured into the shoals by the singing of Sirens. Think of Ulysses as a husband or wife, and divorce as the shoals. Acting on the belief that America's rate of…
A few years ago political advisers to Paul Coverdell, the Republican senator from Georgia, thought he should attend an Atlanta Braves baseball game to show he was a regular guy. But when they went to pick Coverdell up at his house on the outskirts of Atlanta, he was wearing a suit and tie -- keep…
Dianne Feinstein regained top honors in our Appease China Sweepstakes last week and put in a bid for the Moral-Equivalence Lifetime Achievement Award as well. At a Senate hearing, California's senior senator noted that some 300 million Chinese have taken part in villagelevel elections, in which…
"I have spent 33 years of my 64-year-old life in Chinese prisons and Laogai labor camps in Tibet. During those years I yearned for a moment such as this one." Palden Gyatso, a Tibetan nationalist who escaped from Tibet in 1992, finally got his moment two years ago. He was testifying, along with…
SUPPOSE YOU'RE THE HARD-WORKING HEAD of a household of four. Should you put more energy into earning? The decision will hinge partly on how much of any new income you will keep after paying taxes.
Thomas Lahusen
Will Self
Since winning control of Congress nearly three years ago, there's been lots of talk from Republicans about eliminating racial preferences. The GOP has little to show for its efforts, but that could soon change. Rep. Asa Hutchinson and Sen. Mitch McConnell are set to introduce amendments to the…
In music, as in chess, tennis, and other pursuits, child prodigies come and go. Some flame out quickly, never to be heard from again. They have their time upon the stage, displaying their precocious technique, beaming at astonished applause, then exit. There comes a point -- 15, 16, 17 -- at which…
Al Gore is easy to dislike. There are his idiosyncratic policy fevers, like global warming, which give off the distinct vibration of a man naive beneath his years. There is Gore's career-long habit of super-partisan rhetorical crudity -- which goes little noticed, so complete is his disguise as a…
The Cat in the Hat doll lying at his feet grinned as Al Gore leaned back in his chair to reflect on the broken state of American politics. It was a little before noon on the first Friday of September. Gore was sitting in an empty classroom at the Woodman Park Elementary School in Dover, New…
Jacki Lyden
Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster and one of the foremost "communications" advisers to Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, has just posted a bulletin to congressional Republicans. It is a 222-page bulletin, a bulletin with 24 chapters and six appendices. It comes in a three-ring binder as white as…
The New York Times reported last Friday that the Chinese government is planning to return a high-performance supercomputer to the United States. The computer, which the Chinese bought from California-based Sun Microsystems, had been illegally diverted to a military facility, prompting Madeleine…
Lynn Martin, former Bush labor secretary and unsucessful Illinois GOP Senate candidate, on next year's potential GOP candidate against Democrat Carol Moseley-Braun: "She's not afraid of being a woman, not afraid of being strong, not afraid of the whole gamut." Who says Republicans have run out of…
National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" -- once satirized by right- wingers as "Morning Sedition" -- actually ran a weepy story last week on a group of smallbusiness owners who work from their homes and feel oppressed by high business taxes and government licensing requirements. Just who are…
Republican senators got an unwelcome jolt last week at one of their usually uneventful Tuesday lunch meetings -- a poll that showed they were in deep trouble. The poll, conducted by the Republican National Committee during the first week of September, gave the president his highest positive rating…
JOHN SUNUNU, THEN PRESIDENT BUSH'S White House chief of staff, commented famously back in the spring of 1991 that Congress needn't pass anything at all for the next 18 months. Everything was set for Bush's reelection. He'd won Desert Storm and enacted several significant pieces of legislation (the…
You don't have to be British to see that the least likely result of Princess Diana's death and the astonishing reaction to it is the undoing of the British monarchy. Britain may now have little need of the monarchy as unifying symbol in time of crisis, but the royal family still has a remarkable…
"TELL US WHAT YOU FEEL!" That's the demand that has been barraging the British royal family for two weeks. Ah, you can imagine the Windsors thinking, if only we dared! This woman who broke up her marriage when it failed to live up to her Barbara Cartland fantasies, who then disgraced herself with…
LAST YEAR, A BILL TO PROHIBIT private employers from discriminating against homosexuals was defeated in the Senate by a narrow 50-49 vote. President Clinton had endorsed the bill. A top item on the gay agenda, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is back this year. The president has…
Perhaps the most inviting target for defense cuts in recent years has been that catchall activity described, usually derisively, as "peacekeeping." The most controversial peacekeeping effort has, of course, been in Bosnia. Republicans have consistently opposed the introduction and maintenance of…
Keith Windschuttle
Freshman year at college is generally considered a period of transition: You need time to make your way out from under the avalanche of free condoms and learn how to study with a constant hangover. And universities can be quite insistent on subjecting all their new students to the mandatory…
September is the month when sports fans get reacquainted with the United Way. They recognize the charity as the sponsor of those fuzzy commercials during National Football League telecasts, where gridiron greats like Reggie White and John Elway, surrounded by throngs of smiling children, extol the…
Peter W. Morgan and Glenn H. Reynolds
Her reproof contained the sting of a salt bath in a leper colony. I've been called worse -- in fact, I am worse. But the charge held extra resonance since it was leveled by my wife, who possesses a special knack for pinning the tail on my peculiarities with a fat, blunt acuity that leaves little…
Every disgraced politico needs a guru. Richard Nixon had Rabbi Korff; Hillary Clinton has Eleanor Roosevelt; and Dick Morris has . . . Armstrong Williams.
Two weeks ago, Americans were briefly alerted to a history of state-coerced sterilization in modern Sweden. A series of articles in Dagens Nyheter, the leading Stockholm daily, had recently detailed the program under which nearly 60,000 "socially inferior" and "subnormal" Swedish women were…
This fall, the nation will hear the opening shot in a battle over education. President Clinton will unveil a plan that will sound new, but that will, in fact, be the same, stale, statist approach that the education establishment has foisted on the taxpayers for more than a generation.
It seems so gloriously square now -- all those raw, vital innocents with their flared-nostril manifestoes like the Port Huron Statement, modestly composed in an effort to change "the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century." It's been a tough haul ever since for those who suckled on…
Richard Lugar's pique with Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is no secret. But now he wants to circumvent not just Helms but Madeleine Albright, secretary of state, as well. THE WEEKLY STANDARD has obtained a lengthy confidential memo Lugar recently sent to Sandy…
I'M DEAD SERIOUS ABOUT THIS," says Republican senator John McCain of his threat to attach sweeping campaign-finance reform to nonbudget bills that come to the Senate floor. In the afterglow of the bipartisan balanced-budget agreement, McCain is promising disruption. If he makes good on his threat,…
An interesting newcomer to anti-affirmalye-action ranks is the left-wing San Francisco bi-monthly Mother Jones (named for Mary Harris Jones, 1830- 1930, scourge of child labor and, as the masthead has it, "orator, union organizer, and hellraiser"). The editorial in the September/October issue is…
In our August 4 issue, we reported that congressman Jim Leach saw private investigator Jack Palladino near Mr. Leach's house one evening in 1994. At the time we published our story, our sources were confident of this information. Mr. Palladino has now written to Mr. Leach and to THE WEEKLY STANDARD…
The problem with writing worse books is that they tend to reach back and infect an author's better books. Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, and John Updike have all, at one time or another, produced failures that managed mostly to expose problems they had successfully masked in their masterpieces. When…
WATCH FOR SAME-SEX MARRIAGE to become the latest rage at America's university chapels. Recently Harvard's chaplain, himself a homosexual, announced that his chapel will extend its "hospitality" to male-male and female-female couples. The chapel at Stanford has hosted two same-sex ceremonies in the…
Tom Hiney
Why is Secretary of State Madeleine Albright going to the Middle East only days after three suicide bombers killed four and wounded 170 in Jerusalem? Because, the president says, the bombers wanted to kill not only civilians but the peace process itself, and they cannot be allowed to succeed. Oh?…
I'm holding up traffic. I'm walking down the street in Burlington, Vermont, and I come to a corner and see a car approaching so I stop. The car stops. Meanwhile, I've been distracted by some hippies playing Frisbee in the park, and I stand there daydreaming for what must be 15 or 20 seconds. The…
The testimony of the three Buddhist nuns -- venerable Man Ho, venerable Yi Chu, and venerable Man Ya -- made headlines everywhere the day after their first appearance at Sen. Fred Thompson's campaign-finance hearings. But it didn't make the same headlines. The Washington Times had the most…
THROUGHOUT 1995, RALPH NADER, Joan Claybrook, and the rest of the Washington "consumer advocacy" lobby spewed venom at congressional Republicans for the death and carnage that would result from the GOP's budget and regulatory policies. On no issue was the hysteria more inflated than on what may…
Charter schools, publicly funded but independent of local school officials, run on a shoestring. They receive, on average, 80 to 90 percent of the funding that regular public schools get. So what is the Clinton administration doing to help? Not pressing states to provide fuller funding for charter…
J. Anthony Lukas
In late August, Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston placed an expiatory statue of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti -- the two professed anarchists electrocuted for their part in a 1920 robbery-murder in southeastern Massachusetts -- in front of its public library. The sculpture is by Gutzon Borglum,…
"STUPOR MUNDI" (Wonder of the World) -- thus was young Otto III greeted in 996 when the pope selected him emperor in Rome. As fate chose Otto as its instrument to lead Western Christendom past the first millennium, so Bill Clinton has assumed the burden of carrying humankind over the threshold to…
Laurence Bergreen
Mitch Wallerstein doesn't seem like someone you'd want in a key job affecting national security. In the 1980s, when the Reagan administration was tightening controls on American exports to Communist countries, he noisily called for export liberalization. Through the Bush years, he used his perch at…
FEW NEWS ITEMS ARE SURER TO GAIN approving attention from the media elite than social-science studies that challenge traditional childrearing practices. So it was that on August 15, newspapers nationwide trumpeted the findings of one Murray A. Straus, sociologist at the University of New Hampshire…
For the first time in more than a year, the prospects for a successful, lasting, and even a relatively just peace in Bosnia have improved. In recent weeks, one indicted war criminal was captured by NATO troops, and another was killed trying to resist capture. Meanwhile, the Bosnian Serbs, hitherto…
When it comes to making nice with the butchers of Beijing, there's plenty of competition. With his interview in the Aug. 17 New York Times Magazine, Philip Murray Condit, chairman and CEO of Boeing, gives our earlier appeasement laureates -- California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Georgetown professor…
Nathanael West
America is changing more rapidly and more for the better than almost anyone in Washington yet realizes. The evidence is there, in plain sight, in publicly reported statistics whose import almost no one seems to realize. What the numbers tell us is this: The crime rate and the welfare rolls are…
CHINA HAS BEEN MUCH IN THE NEWS lately, what with its most-favored-nation status and its takeover of Hong Kong. We ask, Does China represent a threat to American interests and to peace in general? Or, with economic liberalization, is it becoming less of a threat? It is true that Beijing is…
William Weld's campaign to become the next U.S. ambassador to Mexico is set to enter a new phase. Sources told the Boston Herald last week that the former governor plans to scrap his "quiet diplomacy" and start "making noise again."
You can't sit down here in the convention center ballroom without first picking up the cardboard placard on your chair, either a "Speaker Newt!" in blue, or an "I >SO> Newt" in red. Each of 1,300-odd delegates to the 1997 " Midwest Republican Leadership Conference" has been given a "Newt's Friend"…
A high point of my summer vacation was a long-anticipated visit to the sculpture garden at the San Francisco dump.